RANT ALERT

While watching an episode of Samantha Brown’s Asia tonight, we came across something that always draws my ire — unnecessary subtitles for non-American/European English speakers.

It almost never fails: When an American or European is speaking, unless they are absolutely indecipherable, you won’t see any subtitles. When someone from any other part of the world is speaking, however, there’s probably about a 50-50 chance there will be subtitles, no matter if they are actually necessary. The first time I noticed this was back in high school. During a history class, we were watching a video that included a number of interviews with international experts. When the Americans and Europeans were talking, there were no subtitles, even though there were a couple people who probably could have used it. When the one Asian guy is talking, however, everything was subtitled. Midway through the video, I started looking away whenever the Asian guy was talking, just to see if I could understand what he’s saying without seeing the words. And sure enough, I could, much better than I could understand a couple of the Europeans. I wasn’t the only one in class to notice this either. It quickly became a running joke through the entire class.

More than 15 years later, it hasn’t gotten any better. I find that every time I see subtitles on TV now, I instinctively look away to see if I can understand the person without the subtitles. I would say at least a third of the time, if not half, the subtitles are unnecessary, and in almost every case, the unnecessary subtitles only appear when a non-American/European is speaking in English. I understand that subtitles help comprehension. Heck, I would’ve killed for subtitles for a Mexican professor I had one year in college who kept pronouncing “think tanks” as “tink thanks”. Still, even in that class, I found that if I just focused a little more, I could make out what the professor was saying. I understand that on TV you don’t want people have to strain to comprehend the speaker, but a lot of times it seems non-Americans/Europeans are subtitled by default. It really gets on my nerves.

My wife and I are avid viewers of the Travel Channel. While we generally prefer No Reservations or Bizarre Foods, we’ve spent many an hour snarking on Samantha Brown’s ditziness while we watching her travels in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Lately, we’ve been watching her ditz it up around Asia, though I’d say that this series is a bit better than her Great Weekends series, which pretty much consisted of her going shopping and getting boozed up. However, her pathetic showing in the last couple episodes — Cambodia and Vietnam — has really incurred my wrath.

Her travel sins:

• Everywhere she goes, she makes a big fuss about finding authentic culture. Ironically, you see English signs and a number of fluent English speakers at most of the places she visits — a dead giveaway that she’s in touristy locales. I’m fine with touristy. Heck, I do my share of touristy things when we travel, but I don’t fool myself into thinking I’m blending in with the locals. Does Samantha think that the typical family in a Vietnamese village would be fluent in English?
• In a segment about food in Cambodia, she starts off raving about the variety of food available, and then ends up going to one of the most upscale restaurants in the country, a complete departure from the street-food scenes she had just shown. Ok, that’s alright, but what happened next sent me over the edge. The chef prepares for her a giant prawn from the Mekong River and tells her, correctly, that the best part was the brain of the prawn (the yellow head fat you see in shrimp heads). She immediately winces. When they sit down to lunch, Samantha oh-so-predictably tells the chef, “I think I’ll let you have the brain.” First of all, it’s not like eating shrimp heads is that exotic a practice, even in America. Any foodie worth their salt knows that it is indeed the best part on a shrimp. Secondly, you’re traveling, Samantha. Where is your sense of adventure? Stop being a wuss, listen to the chef, and eat the damn brain!
• Speaking of being a wuss, there’s her street-market scene in Vietnam. So she goes to a street market and raves about what a great experience it is to walk through it. Then she says she has to blur her vision a bit whenever she walks past a meat stand so as to avoid seeing things she doesn’t want to see. Ok, yes, there can be some things in an Asian street market that might be shocking to Westerners. But then she points to one stand and says, “See what I mean?” They cut to that stand and the sight that so horrified her was … a couple of plucked chickens. Really? Chickens? Out of all the potentially disturbing sights she might see in an Asian meat market? Why yes, Samantha, chickens have heads and feet. This is what real chicken looks like, not those precut, shrink-wrapped slices of breasts in your American grocery stores or the thin slices of meat in your deli.
• In the final segment of the Cambodia episode, she visits a nature preserve (again replete with English-speaking guides and English signs, of course). First, she idiotically asks the guide, “So are there animals out here to see?” And then she freaks out when the guide tells her that there are, among other animals, king cobras. She acts like a total pansy about having to tread through a couple feet of muddy water to reach the bank of the river, which was only about 10 yards away. Then, while trekking down a path through the forest, she again freaks out when they come across a giant spider, even though she’s standing a good 10-20 feet away from it.

To top it all off, her jungle trek ends on a secluded beach where she said she was going to spend the night. So you’re thinking a rustic woman-with-nature scene with campfire and sleeping bags. Then you remember this is Samantha we’re talking about. She’s staying in a tent, but it’s a tent whose interior is straight out of a hotel room, replete with a Western-style toilet (the one thing that seems to put her most at ease). To top it off, there’s someone there to pour her drinks, cook her a meal, and make a fire on the beach so she can lounge on a chair, sip booze, and admire the view. You’re really roughing it there.

Just when you think it can’t get any worse, she writes on her blog:

I should mention in the interest of full disclosure that I did not spend the night in the tent on the beach. As awesome as it was after seeing that spider and then being told by the guide that a jaguar or some large Travel Channel-host-eating cat was walking the beach the other day I thought best that I just go back to the hotel. I know my limits.

Just unbelievable. Not only does she pick about the most touristy thing she can do — stay in novelty lodging accommodations on a secluded beach with someone to cater to her every need — she is too wussy to actually stay there. Her unadventurous nature is kind of the antithesis of what a traveler should be. If she comes across a local food stall selling delicious but slightly “non-American” looking food next to a Seven Eleven, she’d probably go into the latter and get a gas-station hotdog instead of trying the local food. She’s acting like the worst kind of travelers — the ones who want to just go out in the morning to see the sights in a foreign country, eat a club sandwich in some faux Western cafe, and then come home to America at night. I’m not asking for her to get totally immersed in the local culture or start doing her own Bizarre Foods show (though that’d be something to watch), but if you are all about finding “authentic” local culture, you can start by sucking down the head fat from that prawn like the locals do (except I wonder how many locals can afford to go that restaurant).

Side note: On the plus side, her ditziness is helping pump more money into the local economies of these countries. I loved that in the final scene of the Vietnam episode, she gets suckered into buying a whole crate of birds to release at the Buddhist pagoda (tourist fleecing, anyone?), and that just as she was getting all spiritual before releasing the birds, the monk walks away to answer a cellphone call and then comes back smirking at the camera. Very Zen.

Side note No. 2: Travel Channel, please send her to sub-Sahara Africa for her next series. Please please please??

UPDATE, Oct. 24, 2011

If you asked me which post on my blog would generate the most comments and have the most staying power, I would not have guessed this one. It’s been more than a year since I wrote this, and it’s apparently found a bit of a second wind as I’ve gotten a number of comments on it (mostly disagreeing with me) in the last few months. Just wanted to let you know that 1) I appreciate you reading and commenting, even if you disagree with me; and 2) unless there’s a really compelling reason, I’m going to stop responding to comments on this post since it’s a year old and basically all I have to say on the subject has been said in the post and in my replies to the comments. I’ve explained my views on this matter in great detail, so there’s not much for me to say without repeating myself. However, don’t let that discourage you from posting or disagreeing with me.

Thanks.

– John

My wife and I don’t watch a ton of TV, but we do like to watch food-related shows. We’ve watched several episodes of “In Search of Perfection” on the Planet Green channel lately. Here’s the gist of the show, according to its Web site:

Regarded as one of the greatest living chefs on the planet, Heston Blumenthal examines some of the UK’s everyday foods in an extraordinary way: bacon and egg ice cream. Snail porridge. Chips cooked using a desiccator.

Heston Blumenthal’s approach to food is as unconventional as it is original. At his restaurant the Fat Duck, voted the Best Restaurant in the World 2005 by Restaurant Magazine and the Michelin Restaurant of the Year 2001, Blumenthal has had great success with his scientific culinary methods and menus that challenge traditional perceptions of flavors. Now he turns his attention to eight of the UK’s favorite dishes.

Follow Blumenthal’s scientific expertise, his obsession and his overwhelming desire to create an incredible sensation and memory link through the palate. The series combines cooking sequences in a purpose built laboratory-style kitchen with trips to meet the UK’s most remarkable food growers and best ingredient providers. Also featured are radical new ways to film the cooking process with innovative cameras and techniques: infrared, ultraviolet, heat sensitive, micro-cams and graphics to illustrate molecular animation. The meals given the Blumenthal treatment include Shepherd’s Pie, Spaghetti Bolognese, Sausages and Mash Potato, Fish and Chips, Roast Chicken, Steak and Salad, Risotto, Pizza, and Treacle Tart and Ice Cream.

As for the show itself, while the lengths to which Blumenthal goes in preparing these dishes are impressive, they are also ridiculous and sometimes make his techniques impractical for the average person (who’s going to make their own cheese for a burger or spend three days roasting a chicken?). He also got on my bad side when, after he expended great effort to secure the freshest (and least stressed) langoustines and other ingredients for his fish pie, he topped it with FROZEN peas. Hey, you are British and you like your mushy peas, fine. But couldn’t you have at least gotten fresh peas?

That complaint aside, however, what really leaves me scratching my head is why this show is on Planet Green. After all, this is a guy who

• has a chicken shipped to his restaurant in England from France instead of using local chicken because it has better flavor
• conducts an MRI scan on a piece of chicken breast to see if the marinade for chicken tikka masala really has an effect (shocking conclusion: it does)
• serves his fish pies with an MP3 player so the patron can hear the sounds of Scottish coastlines while eating
• hires a backhoe to dig a giant hole in his parking lot just so he can build a tandoori oven to make chicken tikka masala
• goes to Holland for the sole purpose of meeting with a food science expert to determine the optimal height for a burger (2:45 mark in the video below)

So he’s not buying local, and I shudder to think about the size of the carbon footprint he leaves in his globetrotting research for one dish. I can understand the desire to find the best ingredients in making the “perfect” dish, but I just don’t understand how this show fits on a network with an eco-minded audience. You would think such a network called Planet Green would go with a cooking show that demonstrates how to use simple, local ingredients to make good, non-fussy meals.

Here’s the first segment of the show. It looks like the entire episode is on YouTube in several segments.

Sound familiar? It should. It’s basically a dead-on impression of that abomination of a Star Trek film last year, and what makes it even funnier is that this came a couple years before that Star Trek film, and then J.J. Abrams went and did exactly what Stargate was making fun of. You can’t even make up stuff like this. To call this clip a parody of the Trek movie would be to deny the eerie resemblance between the two, except one was meant to mock and the other actually thought this was a good idea.

One of the other reasons that we love Stargate is how it constantly rips off old Star Trek plots and admits as much with not-so-subtle tips-of-the-hat to Trek (not to mention a procession of former Trek actors as guest stars on the show). In the same episode as the previous clip, they also did a Star Trek parody:

Once again, the portion after the parody clip makes fun of so many of the things that made the last Star Trek movie so horrible. I wonder if the planning meetings for that Trek movie were anything like this, except not in jest.

Mashable has a nice summary of the controversy, including clips from the talk show “The Young Turks”, which took a very strong stance that the ad is racist. After drawing an avalanche of negative reactions from Australians for that opinion, TYT did a follow-up show in which it stuck to its stance. The hosts’ main points were basically:

• We’re not saying Australians are racist, just that the ad is.
• We understand that from the Australian perspective, the ad is not racist; but Australians should understand that from our perspective, it is.
• Despite the different perspectives, the ad is bad because it propagates American stereotypes to other cultures.

I definitely agree with the first two points, but I disagree with TYT that the ad is bad because it’s propagating American stereotypes. Here’s my question: Why should Australia, or any other country, kowtow to American sensitivities? The TYT hosts are correct that from our perspective, the ad is clearly racist, and if it were an ad intended for an American audience, I would be first in line decrying it and wondering out loud how anyone could have thought this was acceptable. But the key phrase  in that statement is “our perspective”, and while the TYT hosts were busy being so concerned about American stereotypes being exported to other cultures, they seemed to have no problem with pushing their own American attitudes — in this case, America’s hypersensitivity to anything remotely pertaining to race, which makes us immediately scan for racial undertones in everything we see — onto other cultures. Instead of West Indies fans, we see black West Indies fans. And instead of cannibals (in another chicken ad that TYT points to in its follow-up show), we see black cannibals.

If the same racial undertones that Americans immediately detect in the ad stand out for Australians as well, then I would agree we have a problem. However, if within their cultural framework the imageries don’t suggest racial stereotypes (that they don’t see it as a commentary on black people), then who the heck are we to demand that they adopt our attitudes toward race? In their follow-up show, the TYT hosts acknowledge the difference in cultural perspectives, yet immediately disregard it and essentially say, “Yes, there’s a difference in the way the two cultures view race, but ours is the right way.” Can there be a clearer display of ethnocentrism? TYT tries to make the argument that KFC is an American company and therefore beholden to American values. That’s a weak argument, however, since in this day and age, the likes of KFC are really international corporations, serving a wide array of markets, each with its own culture and attitudes. For all but the most extreme cases, it would be asinine to demand that all those markets conform to the sensitivities of one culture, and extremely arrogant and ethnocentric to demand that that one culture be ours.

Let’s put ourselves on the flip side of that equation: Imagine how we would react if people in India demanded we pull ads encouraging the consumption of beef from American TV because it’s offensive to Hindu beliefs. Hey, if we demand another country adopt our race-phobia, why shouldn’t another (and one with a much bigger population than the U.S. no less) demand we adopt their food phobias?